Total porn ban proposed by Michigan lawmakers
40 comments
·September 15, 2025runako
rented_mule
So, for example, Viola / Cesario in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Who needs great literature? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viola_(Twelfth_Night)
And regarding "the other biological sex"... It is not at all simple to define biological gender in a such a way that there are only two of them. Genitalia, hormones, and chromosome patterns are far from sufficient. In many cases, the gender assigned at birth is arbitrary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
bigyabai
The government can take my VHS copy of The Nutty Professor from my cold, dead hands. It won an Academy Award!
commandersaki
Yeah sure one thing is banning porn, but then there's this little nugget:
The bill's sponsors are also pushing for violators of the Anticorruption of Public Morals Act to register as sex offenders.
vrosas
The point is to dehumanize those who oppose them, and putting someone on a sex offender registry, in jail, and hitting them with crippling debt is a sure fire way to do it, even if it’s thrown out in court later.
adamredwoods
>> Earlier this year, he said porn and human trafficking were linked, adding that "shutting down the porn industry would be a crushing blow to the human trafficking industry."
I doubt this logic, but open to arguments, as I'm not an expert.
k310
The law of unintended consequences says that people would find other outlets, namely incest and rape. Oh, and human trafficking.
Smart thinking there.
Poor fellow.
> Well, I first became aware of it during the physical act of love.
> Yes, a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed.
> Luckily, I was able to interpret these feelings correctly.
> Loss of essence. I can assure you it has not recurred.
> Women sense my power and they seek the life essence.
> I do not avoid women. But I do deny them my essence.
Dr. Strangelove
amanaplanacanal
I wonder... Do those folks take an oath of office to uphold the Constitution? Because that whole thing is unamerican.
greyface-
The bill's text: https://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/2025-2026/billintro...
tamimio
> includes any content, digital, streamed, or otherwise distributed on the internet, the primary purpose of which is to sexually arouse or gratify, including videos, erotica, magazines, stories, manga, material generated by artificial intelligence, live feeds, or sound clips.
So I assume this will also include OF, dark romance books, online blogs, shared texts in group chats?
micahdeath
Does this mean that a spouses Facebook page is illegal if they are cute?
amarant
Handmaid's tale looking more prophetic by the day!
Positively clearvoyant!
tomhow
We'll let the normal penalties pull this off the front page, because there are countless laws proposed by activist lawmakers, very few of which ultimately make it into law. HN has always preferred to wait until something is actually passed into law before considering it worthy of front page time here.
Hizonner
It's true that US state legislators propose a lot of whackjob bills that get exploited for headlines and then die. They usually don't have 5 co-sponsors, though, not even out of 110 in a chamber.
tomhow
The guidelines already state that "most stories about politics" are off topic, "unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon". We've had plenty of stories about censorship of adult content lately. Politicians campaigning to censor adult content is nothing new. We don't need to feed their eternal hunger for attention. The rest of the internet can do that just fine. If and when this ever becomes something that meets the HN guidelines, it can have its due attention.
tastyface
And yet you regularly disable flags for tech-irrelevant current events with limited discussion potential (Hulk Hogan death, Venezuela boat strike, etc.) while keeping flags enabled for comprehensively researched articles like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44816165
I am concerned you do not see your own biases in play.
giraffe_lady
You're so unprepared for the emerging political reality in the US it almost looks intentional.
tomhow
The rest of the internet can cover this stuff just fine. We don't need to let eternally attention-hungry politicians be the reason to drag HN away from its purpose for existing.
giraffe_lady
What would be the reason to drag HN away from its purpose for existing? If the answer is "nothing" it's a ready-made propaganda outfit.
null
OutOfHere
Any person who says he answers to Jesus Christ alone is wholly unsuitable for being a politician. (As per his Wikipedia article, he does.)
givemeethekeys
How will they enforce this?
OutOfHere
Do people not realize that something is seriously wrong with Hacker News when all exposes of the bad actions of the Republican Party immediately get flagged? What is dang doing about it? I think article flagging should be removed altogether, replaced by automatic flagging when it has -5 points.
If Michigan's proposal were to become law, it would have extreme repercussions on the tech industry to block off Michigan.
system2
Google ads for Michigan area VPN keywords will skyrocket that's for sure.
galaxy_gas
Use/distribution of any VPN tool is 100-500k penalty per
autoexec
Only a matter of time before they outlaw VPNs.
gurumeditations
The Republican Party proposed it
autoexec
Of course! Nothing says "small government" like going through every person's internet history and DVD collection to find things they personally don't like and making people a criminal because of them.
xenospn
“ The bill's primary sponsor, Rep. Josh Schriver, has been outspoken about his desire to enact a total porn ban in the state.”
$100 says this guy is absolutely hiding something.
IlikeKitties
His Wikipedia Page is something to behold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Schriver
> During his tenure in the Michigan legislature, he has called for a ban on hormonal birth control,[3] pornography,[4][5] same-sex marriage and gender-affirming care for adults,[6] as well as promoted the Great Replacement conspiracy theory.[7]
And please take a look at the picture. It's something else.
Cheer2171
I was expecting an octogenarian. He's 33 years young.
vrosas
> Schriver has stated that he believes pornography "harms all who come into contact with it" and has publicly compared its use to that of heroin.
You can tell what this dude’s problem is..
mystraline
[flagged]
In addition to the headline, this bill would also criminalize such popular movies as Hairspray, Mrs. Doubtfire, and Tootsie, for which Dustin Hoffman won a Golden Globe. (And quite obviously a fair bit of music videos and general entertainment industry content would also become illegal.)
>> The bill also includes a section that takes aim at transgender individuals by prohibiting material "that includes a disconnection between biology and gender by an individual of 1 biological sex imitating, depicting, or representing himself or herself to be of the other biological sex."